Reagan in Truth and Fiction

Cockburn, Alexander, The Nation

Nixon thought Reagan was "strange" and, so he told the secret tape recorder in the Oval Office in 1972, "just an uncomfortable man to be around." The late President certainly was a very weird human being, not at all like the fellow being hailed this week as the man who gave America back its sense of confidence and destiny after the Carter years.

The ceremonial schedule for Reagan's corpse the week after his death had it lying "in repose" for several days. What else was it supposed to be doing? Anyway, Reagan always stuck to his script, and even if he had come to in the presidential library in Simi Valley, he would have stayed with his allotted role and lain doggo.

Reagan was "in repose" much of his second term, his day easing forward through a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog. Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. I saw him at the Republican convention in New Orleans in August of 1988, where he sat in his presidential box entirely immobile, with the kind of somber passivity one associates with the shrouded figure in some newly opened Egyptian tomb before oxygen commences its mission of decay. I never saw him being "sunny," a favorite adjective of the hagiographers. As an orator or "communicator" he was terrible, with one turgid cliche following another, delivered in a folksy drone punctuated by wags of the head.

There was no internationally recognized border in Reagan's mind between fantasy and fact, the dividing line having been abolished in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe. "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, bent over photos of starved babies in Poland, gritting between "set lips" that "this would make it a pleasure to kill." A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that Reagan wished to be photographed on his front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.

Reagan had absolutely no moral sense about truth or falsity. Forty years after Fort Wacky, as Commander in Chief, R.R. told Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel, that he had helped to liberate Auschwitz, had returned to Hollywood with film footage of the ghastly scenes he had witnessed, and if in later years anyone controverted the reality of the Holocaust over the Reagan dinner table, he would roll the footage till the doubts were stilled. It was all fantasy, but I'm sure Reagan believed it, the same way he regarded his trip to the SS cemetery in Bitburg as a useful reminder to Europeans of the great days of World War II, when the people of the Free World--American, British, French and German--fought shoulder to shoulder against Soviet totalitarianism. …

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